


Bachelor Dandies, Drinkers of Brandies

by landofspices



Series: Only Our Dark Does Lighten: canon-based episode tags [2]
Category: Robin Hood (BBC 2006)
Genre: Angst, Episode Related, F/M, Guy-centric, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Rape Fantasy, Servants, Sexual Abuse, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-29
Updated: 2016-04-29
Packaged: 2018-06-05 04:07:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6688525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/landofspices/pseuds/landofspices
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is an episode-related story for 1.13 (the failed wedding), and thus focused on unrequited Guy/Marian. It's also a reflection on Thornton (good!Thornton, Robin's steward and thus Guy's by default) and on the Locksley villagers' hatred of Guy. </p><p>[tw: abusive Vaisey/Guy in the background; Guy (briefly) has violent and non-con fantasies about revenge on Marian.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bachelor Dandies, Drinkers of Brandies

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Eugeal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eugeal/gifts).



> This is a gift for Eugeal; thanks for the great Thornton conversation which inspired me to write this! I'd previously thought a lot about writing something based on the failed wedding, but hadn't been able to nail down any kind of structure: Thornton gave me the help I needed. Credit for noticing Guy's behaviour with the guards is 100% Eugeal's, not mine. 
> 
> N.B. It's **unrequited** Guy/Marian, being based around the failed wedding. Don't presume that any views expressed by either of the characters are my views, pls. :) Also, if the Guy and Isabella child personalities and physicalities sound different, that is deliberate! We felt the casting of "Bad Blood" was problematic so we've kept the plot but not the actors for our headcanon; this applies in all my stories where young!Guy or young!Isabella appear.

_The Empire does not require that its servants love each other, merely that they perform their duty._

— J. M. Coetzee

 

He is a peasant, and not a lettered man. Love reads no ledgers, despatches no taxes. Robin knew it — and so Thornton serves, he cannot command. The Earl of Locksley’s last days at home were sunlit ones and there seemed to be laughter in all the rooms: maids’ laughter, men’s laughter, a mood of wooing. As if it were not a parting, but a grand old revel. Yet Robin chose everything, made all things ready, like a man twenty, thirty years older: as if he thought he would not come back. Thornton dared say that only to himself, when the tapers had burnt low and the gay voices stilled. For fear of ill-luck, he would never voice it.

To Edward of Knighton, the care of my lands, my flocks, my peasants.

Two years the crops come in thickly, harvests Robin would be proud of. No hungry winters and children with glistening eyes, waiting for Robin to come to their door. Master, Master, the wolf, he gnaws. Well, do not be afraid, for I shall scare him off in a trice. I am a wolf expert, been at it for years now.

The usual deaths, of old people, women in childbed, and babes. No cruel weather. No ravishments. No fires. Edward of Knighton says he has written to Robin, though letters are an uncertain thing. But he has sent word that all is well, is very well. Two weeks later, Eadwin, a child of six summers, is gored by the bull and lies a night and day on the rim of death. Yet he does not die: he drifts slowly back, blind in one eye and his left arm useless, his mother raining tears.

Oh Robin, Robin. What would you do, Thornton wonders, if you were here? Robin who can touch a heart in grief with that queer, blunt, tender way of his.

*

For a long-drawn moment, Guy thinks he is going to weep.

Yes, before the guards, the priest, and all his household, he will lose mastery of himself. It’s not the sting on his cheek, or his aching thigh and arse where he fell awkwardly. It is only that he cannot get a proper breath into his lungs, that each breath has a catch in it and feels small. His lips are trembling violently, so he bites them together and tastes blood. Get up, get up, he thinks. If someone helps you, it will be the end.

He puts his palm to the cold floor and pushes himself upright. It’s like walking for the first time after illness. He thinks, I’m going to fall. His head feels dreadful, heavy, too much for him. The press of tears behind his eyes is a distraction from everything. He can hardly keep his feet.

I want to go home, he thinks. But where is it? Moments later, he is picking up his mother’s ring, amazingly still warm from Marian’s hand. It presses into his palm, little and sharp and dear.

They used to sit in Ghislaine’s chamber and try it on their narrow, children’s fingers. I shall have a husband with eyes stormy as the sea, Isabella said, twisting the ring round and round. He will bring me a golden apple, he will bring me a silver pear. Guy’s hands rippled on the lute strings. When at last he laid it down to have his turn, to try the ring, it was hot with Isabella’s fiery skin. He would not say what he wanted in his bride. Oh, you are shy, Ghislaine said softly. She stroked his hair. Never mind that, my darling.

The church shifts and rustles. He knows they aren’t sure whether to stay or go, and they’re afraid of him. He cannot speak. He doesn’t trust his voice. Guy turns away from them all and faces the altar: it dances in front of him, maddeningly bright. If they had not made the church so fine with flowers —

If he had waited within for her, as he was supposed to —

He hears Thornton whisper, sending them out.

*

He’s an odd one, the new master. He comes with Sheriff Vaisey and looks chiefly at him, sparing the house and the peasantry no more than quick, nervous glances. Thornton remembers him, remembers the whole family: that Frenchwoman with her dark cloak of hair, and the thin children, boy and girl, pretty-featured and always left out. He didn’t see them banished, didn’t see the fire, but he still recalls the day the boy’s father was cast from the village. The only leper Locksley and Gisborne had ever known, and not a man nor woman would miss the chance to see him — and a noble lord, at that, the Lady Ghislaine’s husband, back from the dead, some said, like Lazarus, but the priest soon stopped their mouths. He stood straight and calm in the grave as the children shrank against their mother, as she proclaimed herself widowed.

Gisborne’s naked blue eyes tell more than he probably wants them to. The man is courteous enough, but angry, and very young. He gives his orders in a reasonably firm voice: the horses, the house, the peasants. Do this, about the meals. The number of my guards is, so. And yet Thornton sees him look around as if for reassurance; perhaps he is used to being always at the Sheriff’s side.

Two summers older than Robin, he recalls. Nay, and a few months more. How Robin seemed never to worry himself, but to know instinctually, by the land’s obstinate pulse in his very flesh, what should best be done. He took life more easily, and won its hand and heart. He was master not by title, but by a gilding of the blood in his veins: Locksley flowed there, and he understood its silts, its songs, its softnesses.

Gisborne is a man adrift. He sleeps at Locksley and rides away to Nottingham Castle, stiff-backed on his fine gelding. Sometimes he comes back every night and eats late: he says little of the food, drinks too much. This is a man who needs a father, Thornton thinks. Is Vaisey a good lord? There are rumours of hangings in Nottingham, but it’s November and the thieving always increases as the weather worsens. Sir Edward made examples too, sometimes.

There’s a bad frost, early. Gisborne is at the castle and the house feels silent, dreary, void. The riot of guards has given it a sort of life, though Thornton notices that Gisborne does not know how to talk to them: he sits amongst them sometimes, but quietly. He drinks with them, but not as Robin would, one of the crowd, beloved.

He comes back wan and sullen, with a cut to his childish lip.

*

At least Vaisey wasn’t here to see, he thinks. At least —

He is alone in the flower-smelling church. And he feels suddenly cold, tired, as if it had been a long day. It’s not worth praying for anything. Now that it would not be a catastrophe, the burning need to weep has faded; it is often the way, he has noticed this before, that you feel things at the wrong time. The guilt comes too late, and gripes your belly in the night.

Guy walks back to the manor by himself. The ring bumps about, a little nub of warmth in his hand. Women are deceivers ever. Now the sun has gone in and everyone has scattered, no one wants to see him. Nobody dares cross his path.

He thinks of sitting on the floor of Vaisey’s chamber and tipping his head back, strong hands peeling through his hair. The fingers dipped into the hollow of his throat where the collar-bones met and stroked him there.

The door, the hearth, upstairs. The chamber where he showed Marian his chest of gathered wealth. He tries to collect himself into manhood, to be the man he knows he should be. I will take her, he tells himself, force her. The dress ripped down from her breasts, a knife cutting her shift up the middle. All of her visible, bare, ready. He thinks of her eyes looking up at him, full of tears. What do women say? What would she say? No, Guy, no. Guy, no.

He is giddy. One moment he’s standing on shaking legs, then he’s on the edge of the bed, crawling onto it and curling around himself. What is that noise? It’s a sound he’s making, but there’s no word for it.

*

It was not the going of Robin that brought Locksley to hard times, but the coming of Gisborne. So it seems to Thornton, to the maidservants, to the grooms, and the men and women in the fields. He is not hated, for that suggests a certain dignity. Rather, beneath the simple fear of their bodies — which he elicits from time to time, ordering his men to _take that man’s hand, take that woman’s finger_ — most of them despise him. The beldames dare to tell the Gisbornes’ story, risking their tongues. Yes, he cringed in the noose. Yes, he wept. Yes, she was probably a French witch. No one mourned for them. Who knows about the sister. Gone to the bad, like him, good riddance.

The yields are down, the taxes up. Gisborne doesn’t know which families are poor, and probably doesn't care about it. He does nothing to succour the hungry during his first winter.

Thornton watches him ride back and forth to Nottingham with a trail of guards. Are they skirmishing for practice up at the castle? Is Gisborne unskilled in arms, a knight in name only? By turns, his lip is cut, his cheek is bruised, his eye is blackened. It’s really one thing after another when the frost is hard and tempers short, and the hangings daily.

“The Sheriff is feeling sprightly,” Sir Guy says, coming in from the cold rain and shaking off his wet locks, unbuckling his sword belt. “The executions have put him on his mettle.”

He doesn’t seem to know what a strange thing he has said.

Thornton hears him crying out in the night, but the words are not in English, so they explain nothing.

*

Nobody comes for a long time. They are afraid of what he will do to them. Tears are everywhere, running down his neck and into his ears, into his mouth. His nose is streaming, thin and wet.

The bed will be spoiled, and it was all made clean for Marian —

Thornton is there, crouched at the bedside, a linen cloth in his hand. He offers it wordlessly to Guy but Guy cannot take it. What would be the use. His hands are stones, lying on the bed without a purpose. Why was she false. He remembers the intricate lace of her veil floating between them. Thistledown, thistledown. The last thing, made by human hands, to keep them apart.

The tears choke him: like sickness of the lungs, he still can’t get a whole breath. And Thornton is impossibly close, Guy flinches. His face is touched, wiped, with the cloth. Thornton cleans him, as a child, weeping, is set to rights.

This is impossible, and Guy’s sore vision folds itself away. In self-made darkness he feels the cloth, medium-soft, on his cheeks, his lips, his ears, his neck. Not Thornton’s hands, though. Take a dagger, he thinks. Cut his throat. Quickly, while you still can.

He’s too weary. He whispers for wine, making it sound like an order. Wine for the master. The master of Locksley. This man, right here.

*

When they take Dan Scarlett’s hand: that is a bitter thing. The young master will never listen to intercessions, only to the Sheriff. Pleading upsets him.

They have all seen Sheriff Vaisey several times now. He comes at the year’s turn, and for Sir Guy’s birthday feasting. Gisborne’s eyes follow his lord everywhere. He trots after him like a nervous dog in his black leather jerkin, hair bobbing when he nods. Thornton thinks that he smiles more. When the Sheriff smiles, Sir Guy smiles too.

Sir Guy does not cut off Dan Scarlett’s hand. They have all noticed that he orders the punishments but usually doesn’t perform them. A guard does it. The blade is keen, which is something to be thankful for. Thornton watches Sir Guy, how he is looking in the right direction but not truly watching. What would your mother say, he wants to ask. Do you never wonder if she’d be ashamed to see you maim a man like Dan Scarlett — and be too much a coward to see his blood spill onto the ground?

The second bad winter, there was a day when they were collecting the taxes. The Sheriff rode out from Nottingham, and they all saw what happened. “Meek as a girl, Gisborne,” he shouted, “What do they feed you on here, curds and whey? I thought you’d be putting the fear of God into them and I find you tapping a few wrists like a lady abbess.” He struck him hard across the face and Sir Guy’s head jerked back with the force of the blow. A sound of pain came from him, immediate, involuntary: a high, sharp yelp, then a gasp, already tear-clotted. His ungloved hand covered his face, curled round it as he cringed away. He followed the Sheriff back to Locksley. There was silence, then laughter.

In their cups, they still imitate him: the shriek and the flinch. Who cares if it’s the Sheriff who tells him to be harsher? He lives here, in Robin’s house, taking the best from the land. The Sheriff could talk himself blue in the face to Robin, and Robin would pay no heed. It’s those Gisbornes, ever on the make.

It explains the marked face.

And he comes back in pain sometimes, doesn’t he? Not too often. Thornton has told himself for months: saddle sore, aching back. He knows it looks like ten years back, that bad time when the wheelwright’s boy was beaten, left in the ditch for dead, violated. He did not die at once. It was eight days later, from the infection, and in between times everyone saw him, and how he walked. You didn’t have to witness it, the raw wound of Sodom: it proclaimed itself.

He prepares a bath for Sir Guy, and steeps leaves of thyme in it. He does it whenever it is needed.

*

It has grown dim and blue outside. Guy catches the window dulling itself, layering shadow upon shadow. The birds call for something, in their own language. I would call you back to me, he thinks, even now. Your father told me you were excited. He swallows wine, wine, grief.

He has put the ring under his pillow. Maman, that is what he wants to say. Maman, please, I’ve waited a long time.

He will bring me a golden apple, Isabella murmured. He will bring me a silver pear. She fell asleep on her mother’s bed, but he did not, he was older. I will comb your hair, my darling, she said. She was so careful, never hurting him. They spoke in whispers while Isabella slept. Love is a thing to carry with you, she said, to carry pinned in your jerkin, close by your heart. Never leave it behind. It’s like going naked into the world. You can be hurt too easily.

The room fades, there is more shadow than light now. Murderer, the woman says. She kneels at the foot of the bed. Her hair is like his mother’s and her eyes like Marian’s.

*

He makes the food with his own hands when Sir Guy falls ill. In all his years of service he has never been called to mix delicate messes for an invalid master, and there is no real need for it now. Locksley has women servants enough. Is there an ancient pity in his breast for the child who stood shaking, absent all defenders, the noose already clasping his throat?

There is open celebration in Locksley at Sir Guy’s frailty. Dead, they say. Well, as good as. Lying there sweating and shaking, whimpering for his witch mother. There's some talk of cutting off the body’s hands when the time comes; the priest might look the other way, it’s a special case.

The physician says he is not _dying_ , but neither is he safe to live.

Ghislaine of Gisborne was fair of face. The villagers do not speak of her healing art now, it seems to be a thing forgotten. What would she do, if she knew her son lay dying in a chamber at Locksley? Thornton offers the physician rosemary; sage; their small store of cloves. Clean linens are ready, stacked, if they are needed; the best wine is placed close to the outer door, the nearest anyone is allowed to go. The physician says that Sir Guy is weak, sleeping, does not want much.

Gisborne comes out of his rooms looking thin and uncertain, to the villagers’ great sorrow. He has shadows under his eyes and his nights are more disturbed than ever. He slept quietly during the contagion, but now he wakes them every night and the women curse his miserable French shriekings. Since his arrival at Locksley, Sir Guy has occasionally come to Thornton in the morning — his body rigid, eyes washed of everything but shame — and asked him to have the bed changed. Now this weakness of the very young and the very old visits slightly more often, and Thornton wonders if the fever has sapped Sir Guy, who does not know how the women mock at him for it in the kitchens: how angry, helpless, revolted they are becoming.

He’s not even English, people say. That bitch of a mother, should have been put on the ducking stool, shouldn’t she?

She did burn, though, Thornton thinks. She did burn.

“The Sheriff says that if Robin dies, he will grant me Locksley,” Sir Guy says one day. It’s early, the bright-washed dawn licks the grass outside and gleams on Locksley Pond. “For my own,” he adds. It’s rare for him to talk: he’s tired, worried by the thieving and the Sheriff’s anger.

Thornton looks at him. His pallor, his unsteady blue eyes. If it should come to pass, my lad, it will be no good thing for you. He nods agreeably, and hopes in silence — for the sake of every soul in Locksley — that Robin lives. He can see young Sir Guy being forced into the pond one cold night, or bound to a stake, crying, the flames hissing around him: like mother, like son. You need Robin, he thinks. You’re not safe here. You never have been.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on tumblr [here](http://distinctgoldcalling.tumblr.com/) if you want to DM with me about Guy.


End file.
